I continue to be amused by the protagonists of e-voting who claim that we are doomed without paper trails. So here’s some more material to drive you nuts.

For years, Estonia has had this “Riigi Teataja”, or “state gazette” thing where all the laws are published. Originally (from the 1920s onwards and in 1990s) it was a paper publication, but since 1996, it has also had a parallel format, where electronic and paper records had equal force.

Now there’s nothing new here, this has been the case for years (and really convenient if you want to look up some law). What’s cool is that they have now added an English intro about the whole thing (not exactly sure when was that published — and other languages are available from the front page), so you can study it in more detail. And it says this:

As of January 1, 2007, the eRT (the electronic version of the gazette) will become the primary official publication, with only five copies printed on paper.

Let’s reflect on this for a moment. Forget the elections — they only happen once every four years and mostly there are the same people getting elected anyway. But now you have a whole country of more than a million people run around the clock with only five paper copies of the laws…

So, with all due respect to security fundamentalists, according to some of them we should be really doomed by now, since online records can be faked and forged and generally you can’t trust this Internet thing and insecure computing environment.

Yet the country still keeps going just fine.

They are now seriously experimenting with this. Bruce found the link and says…

There’s not a lot of detail, but my guess is that it doesn’t work very well. But that’s not really the point. If it doesn’t work today, it will in five, ten, twenty years; it will work eventually.  What we need to do, today, is debate the legality and ethics of these sorts of interrogations.

I’m intrigued by this, and I haven’t seen “Minority report”. Maybe I should, judging by how many comments refer to it.

Apple says in its ads:

You shouldn’t have to restart your computer simply because you connected a new printer.

Oh yeah? Well guess what. Even though I’m a Mac fanboy now, it doesn’t mean that everything is hunky dory in the OS X world. I’ve more than once found it hard way that it’s the printer drivers that can make things crash instantly. Indeed, not the whole system, but the application you’re currently running. And I’m pissed as I yesterday lost two hours of work because of not saving every five seconds (I admit, my bad, you should do this always and everywhere. But still…).

A lot of my work and hobbies revolve around writing. Be it copywriting or blog posts or guides or instructions or forum posts or e-mails or whatever else there may be.

Now, at Skype we are pretty anal about our brand and language, and try to maintain a high standard in those departments. We obviously have editing guidelines to support us, and amid all the technical and trademark guidelines, there’s a simple one that I have found to be immensely useful both in work and personal writing. And that one says, no exclamation marks.

I’m researching some historic material that has Skype relevance. I found RFC 741 from 22 Nov 1977 (almost 30 years ago!) particularly telling. It talks about Network Voice Protocol, one of the original protocols/purposes of ARPAnet. NVP never took off, but the goal of using packet-switched communication networks for voice exchange remained. Does this have some similarity to what Skype is doing?

The major objective of ARPA’s Network Secure Communications (NSC) project is to develop and demonstrate the feasibility of secure, high-quality, low-bandwidth, real-time, full-duplex (two-way) digital voice communications over packet-switched computer communications networks.

This post by Alec reminds me of a recent encounter I had with FedEx. I was supposed to get some package shipped to some address, but I wasn’t fully sure when the guys would arrive. And their Internet tracking is very nice, but it wasn’t fully obvious when the courier would arrive, so I just left it at that.

So one day there was indeed a slip in the mailbox “we were here but you weren’t around, so we’ll be back tomorrow before 5 PM”. Uhhh… that’s not very convenient if you need to be at work. If I was working somewhere where there was strict office hours checking and you couldn’t work remotely, I would have been in trouble. But I could sit around since morning and wait for the delivery guy who finally showed up around noon.

There was no option for after-hours service, neither did I have an option of going somewhere to pick it up at a time that suits me, which is usually the case if you get deliver through “postal/air mail” and the thing is too big to fit in your mailbox.

So while the good news is that I got my package with minimal waiting, the question is how are “regular people” who need to be at work supposed to be receiving packages (assuming they don’t want the shipment to come to their business/work address).

Can you imagine Bill saying that? I have video footage to prove it below.

Of course, he didn’t say this today or yesterday. The quote comes from over twenty years ago, from the 1984 Apple shareholders’ meeting. You may have seen the famous Macintosh introduction by Steve Jobs. This was part of the meeting that in total runs for one and a half hours.

I got this video from the MacTV podcast. I’m not fully sure who these guys are or why they do this, but they are publishing great Apple content in their video podcast, from the current ads to historic material like this.

And if you don’t bother to watch the video, here’s what Bill said. (Emphasis by me.)

Microsoft is choosing this Apple Macintosh environment because over time, the other environments won’t be interesting.

He may end up being right afterall. At least I agree to this, I find Mac OS X to be extremely interesting compared to others that I have worked with.

(And a random technical sidenote: I previously found how to embed YouTube code as valid XHTML, but seems that Google Reader doesn’t display it inline then. So I’m trying this garbage code that YouTube offers in straightforward verbatim mode and see if Google Reader picks it up.)

We are going to have parliament elections in Estonia on March 4, 2007. And this is my voting station.

We’re going to be the first country doing a binding e-vote in the parliament elections. And to me, it’s very practical, as I’m currently staying elsewhere. On the voting day, I will be hundreds of klicks from the nearest voting station at some Estonian embassy and more than a thousand klicks from Estonia itself, and if I wanted to vote at an embassy, I would have to sign up beforehand and go through a lot of hoops. But now on the Internet, I can just sign in with my ID card and get it done.

Moodgeist is a tiny project that I’ve worked with for the past year on and off. I’ve picked it up a bit again. And two things have happened.

First, there is now a Pinger for Mac. you can see it in the bottom right on the screen below, set on top of the Skype window. It pings all the moods just like the other clients. If you’re a Skype for Mac user and think you could participate, please download and run the Mac pinger. You don’t have to do anything, just leave it running.

Two things of major relevance to each other happened like 10 minutes from each other today just a while ago.

First, my AllTunes credit ran out. I’ve been using them for the past year for purchasing music. Their service, unlike iTunes, was available to me, and they sell DRM-free MP3-s for much cheaper than iTunes does. Are they legal? They say they are in Russia, but I have no idea what it means in the EU/US/JP space. And I don’t really care because I don’t think it’s my job to fix music industry problems. All I know is that these guys say they are good and I can download good-quality music from them cheaply. Which I can’t do in iTunes because I’m a thirdworld citizen to Jobsy.

I took a break from my Objective-C adventures and solved a problem today that has been bugging me for quite a while now. Why can’t you post everything to everywhere?

No, really. Everything.

Huh?

It’s quite handy actually. Realize this: if you’re active on the Internet, you have many feeds going on. You have your blog, or maybe several, on Wordpress, Vox, Typepad, Blogger, Livejournal. You have your del.icio.us, ma.gnolia.com and Google Reader shared items and bookmarks, Flickr photos, who knows what else.

If you are interested in your friends, you must collect these feeds about them and keep track of them all, and conversely they must track your own zillion feeds. This is inconvenient: I want to have one feed about one person and aggregate stuff there.

Is it just me or is the Google Reader acting up recently? It seems to be kind of slow at times and I get the “oops… error” box quite often. Or even this one.

Another thing I’m seeing with it is the logic change. It used to be so that it operated in chunks of 20 posts. So that when you neared the end of the 20 posts, it automatically loaded the next 20. The limit seems to be smaller now and it loads posts in smaller chunks, making it less predictable. Could it be one of load optimizations?